Martial Arts Cannot Lie
Jinmyung climbed the stairs slowly. Moonlight gradually lit the path ahead of him. He extinguished his torch and stepped out onto the surface.
As he emerged, the Geumjatap rose once more. Jinmyung surveyed his surroundings.
His martial cultivation was no longer what it had been when he entered the pagoda. Perhaps that was why he felt someone's gaze settle on him.
"You may come out now."
At his words there was a brief hesitation — then movement stirred behind a cypress tree. The person who stepped out was Dang Sohye.
Though Jinmyung still wore a disguised face, he couldn't help but flinch. He had been expecting the old monk.
"Young Lady Dang, this isn't—"
He never finished the sentence. Dang Sohye swung the paralysis whip bound at her waist.
The whip snaked outward in a long, coiling arc toward his chest. Jinmyung unfurled the Eight Immortals Step and slipped clear of it.
Dang Sohye froze in confusion. To her eyes, the whip had passed straight through his chest as if he weren't there at all.
She lashed out again. The coiling whip struck in rapid succession, each stroke hunting him down.
Not a single attack found its mark. Jinmyung seemed to stand in place, yet every strike simply passed through him.
Startled as she was, Dang Sohye kept pressing the assault. Against the Dang Clan, merely dodging was never the end of it.
The Dang preferred weapons that were anything but ordinary. Their martial arts were built on hidden weapons and poison as a foundation.
Dang Sohye carried two kinds of paralysis whip. One was the whip she had used at the Mt. Hua sword debate — its poison took effect only on contact.
The whip she had drawn now was the combat version. Simply swinging it scattered paralysis toxin through the air around her.
Even so, she couldn't tell whether her methods were working. Ilsu Hwanmyeon occupied his ground with easy composure, offering no counterattack at all.
Dang Sohye weighed whether to force a decisive exchange. Jinmyung, for his part, was startled by the level of his own martial skill.
The evasive form of the Eight Immortals Step — minimal motion, maximum displacement.
What he was performing was Zhongli Quan's Step, the evasive form of the Eight Immortals Step. Zhongli Quan, chief among the Eight Immortals, was famously stout — and just as famously the master of the banana-leaf fan.
Jinmyung had reasoned that a man like Zhongli Quan would have moved as little as possible while still soaring about on that fan. Zhongli Quan's Step had been devised to evade an enemy's attacks with the barest minimum of motion.
But the form he was executing now was throwing off afterimages. Jinmyung hesitated. Should he subdue Dang Sohye — or try to persuade her?
While he deliberated, Dang Sohye halted her assault and reeled the whip back in. It wound itself snugly around her right arm.
"So the Hao Mun dares set its sights on an Emei treasure… I warn you. Surrender quietly."
She tucked the whip-wrapped arm behind her stance. Jinmyung watched her and let out a quiet sigh.
She was in no state to be talked down. Dang Sohye, seeing him draw breath, took it as confirmation of her victory.
The paralysis toxin on her whip was a special formula she had refined from the original. The old version had been mild, but it carried the scent of the flowers used as its base.
Hers gave off nothing at all — yet it already blanketed the air around them. Left alone, within half an hour a body would grow too heavy to move.
Dang Sohye prepared the ultimate technique of the Dang Clan's whip arts.
Nine coils around the arm. At the tip, the pure essence of the whip's poison gathers — then the lash unfurls in a storm that poisons everything it touches.
Nine-Fold Ring Whip began by winding the whip around the arm nine times. At the tip clenched in the hand, the pure essence of the whip's poison had gathered. At a glance the technique looked like an ordinary straight punch.
But the moment the clenched tip was released at the end of the thrust, the nine coils unraveled in a blur and whipped through the surrounding space. Even if the opponent dodged the strike itself, the lash that tore through the air would drench everything nearby in poison.
Using the Nine-Fold Ring Whip would accelerate the toxin's effect still further. Even if this attack missed, she could still bring her opponent down.
That was what she told herself. Jinmyung read the resolve in her eyes. No words would persuade her now.
In the end, he settled into a stance of his own. The cypress trees swayed in the night wind — and Dang Sohye moved.
Her Nine-Fold Ring Whip unfurled. But what followed was nothing like what she had expected.
Jinmyung's fists struck the uncoiling lash one segment at a time as it left her hand. His punches fell like raindrops hammering a water's surface, batting the whip aside in a continuous chain.
Pa-pa-pang! Nine collisions produced fewer sounds than strikes — the impacts came so fast the noises stacked on top of one another. At the end of that flurry, his final hand stopped on Dang Sohye's wrist.
"Might I ask the name of that form… Young Master Go Jinmyung?"
"Are you that determined to strip me down to a blank face?"
"Martial arts can't be disguised. It looks different from the forms you used at the sword debate… but a fist that shines with golden light is rare."
What she had been after was his technique itself. Only then did Jinmyung realize he had been played.
An evolution of the Bankruptcy Fist — resonating with an opponent's energy and striking, in continuous succession, along the very paths their power flows.
"I named it the Golden Monopoly Fist."
The Golden Monopoly Fist was a form refined from the Bankruptcy Fist. Like a poison art, the Bankruptcy Fist disrupted an enemy's internal energy flow on contact.
But the form itself was nothing more than a simple straight punch, which made landing it difficult. When Ak Jun heard the principle behind the Bankruptcy Fist, he had criticized it without mercy.
On the carriage ride home, Jinmyung and Ak Jun had been caught in a sudden downpour. Where the rain met the river, it raised ripples across the water.
The Golden Monopoly Fist resonated with an opponent's energy. It answered their attacks and struck, in continuous succession, along the paths their power flowed.
Jinmyung had used the Golden Monopoly Fist to turn aside the lash of the Nine-Fold Ring Whip. Then, to cut off the variation Dang Sohye was about to follow with, he seized her wrist in a Golden Seize Hand.
"How long have you suspected me?"
"The explanation you gave when you passed the trial was plausible enough. But a human-skin mask isn't something you can make that quickly or that easily. So I wondered if it might just be your bare face."
"Couldn't the Hao Mun have prepared it in advance?"
"Yes — if it were a secret art of a face-changer, it might be different. But… the correct answer is usually the simple one."
The Dang Clan was no ordinary martial house. They were researchers who studied poison. The small doubt planted in Dang Sohye's mind had kept her watching Jinmyung's every move at the Emei Sect.
And when he headed for the Geumjatap, that suspicion swelled. But with a researcher's patience for repeated experiment, she waited.
When the pagoda's form shifted, she was already eight-tenths certain. She wanted that certainty to become complete.
She waited until Jinmyung reappeared. Then she pressed him with talk of the Hao Mun and the Emei Sect.
Under that careful pressure, Jinmyung had no choice but to reveal himself. Only two things had caught her off guard.
The first was that his martial cultivation was high enough for her paralysis toxin not to work on him. She had drawn her combat whip expecting the opposite — and the fact that she had uncovered his identity instead left her a little sore about it.
The second was that Jinmyung was still holding her wrist firmly. As a child, a master or a family member might take her wrist during training to correct her posture.
But she was twenty now, and had reached a level that earned her the name Whip Phoenix — even the Poison Sovereign no longer adjusted her stance by hand. Dang Sohye felt as though he had been holding her wrist for a long time, though in truth it had not been long at all.
She only noticed that the captured wrist felt strangely stiff, and that her face was growing warm.
"H-how long do you plan to hold on?"
"Ah — forgive me."
The moment she spoke, Jinmyung released her wrist at once. Somehow, she felt a small twinge of regret.
"Just… why were you hiding your identity?"
"That is…"
Jinmyung hesitated briefly, then explained. When he told her he had concealed himself for his sister's safety, Dang Sohye nodded.
"I understand why you hid who you were. But why help the Hao Mun with their trial? Why not seek out the orthodox sects of the Sichuan Alliance…?"
"I… did not want to end up like my sister."
Dang Sohye thought for a moment. When she grasped his meaning, a flicker of anger rose in her — but she could offer no real rebuttal.
What Jinmyung meant was that if he went to Sichuan's great sects for aid, he would share his sister's fate: her person seized and held by the Hwangbo Family. Dang Sohye wanted to say that the orthodox Dang Clan would never do such a thing… but she could not be certain.
The Emei Sect and the Qingcheng Sect were one matter. The Sichuan Dang Clan, unlike them, was a family house. Where those two sought enlightenment through cultivation, a family house existed to preserve its power.
Even if Jinmyung, as a descendant of the Merchant King, shared that claim with his sister, it was a fine pretext for swallowing the Central Plains' commercial world. Seeing that Dang Sohye had fallen silent, Jinmyung went on.
"You are clever enough that I trust you understand what I mean. So I ask you — please do not reveal my identity."
Dang Sohye gave a small nod at his words. But another voice drifted out from among the cypress trees.
"That may be difficult. The ground torn up by your exchange of forms, and the formation of the Geumjatap, will be a problem."
Jinmyung and Dang Sohye turned their heads toward the cypresses at the same time.